Radeon HD 4850 2GB vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

The Radeon HD 4850 2GB makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 625 MHz. The GDDR4 RAM is set to run at a speed of 993 MHz on this particular model. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5830, which has a clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1120(224x5) SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.